I was really privileged to take a class from Lynne Ferris this past winter. What a splendid watercolor artist she is! She winters in Florida as I do and was willing to teach a few workshops at the Leesburg Center for the Arts. 
One of her practice lessons included working a figures with lots of light and shadow in them and a lot of chance to look at negative space.
I found this photo of my 12 year grandson, Nate, jumping off our pier last summer. (Have you ever seen more joyful abandon?)
You can see that Lynne asked us to try out some small thumbnail sketches first changing the negative space from light to dark first to see which would facilitate the whole painting best. I chose the light background this time.
Getting in the habit of thumbnails is not easy. But it really does help to solve a lot of the compositional issues before you start the painting. I ended up throwing some salt and splattering below the figure to sort of give the idea of the splashing even though he actually hadn't yet hit the water. Artistic license.
Take a look at Lynne's website by clicking on her name above as she is worth looking at if you don't know her work.
No comments:
Post a Comment